Finance & Capital Management

San Francisco – Gap Inc. has reportedly experienced a 10% increase in job applications since its February announcement that it would raise its minimum wage for employees to $10 per hour by 2015. According to Bloomberg, the increase has occurred across all Gap brands, including Banana Republic and Athletica, but has been most pronounced at Old Navy, where applications had previously been declining.

Tewksbury, Mass. – Demoulas Supermarkets Inc. has fired CEO Arthur T. Demoulas. The retailer also fired director of operations Bill Marsden and VP of grocery Joe Rockwell.

Demoulas had been waging a public battle with his cousin Arthur S. Demoulas, a stakeholder and director of the company, about finances. Arthur T. Demoulas has claimed that his cousin seeks to raise prices and lower wages. The cousins have also publicly disagreed about agreements with suppliers and vendors.

It’s a common retail scenario: Last year, several sites deployed consistent schedules and set-points and also staged energy-consuming assets into groups that engaged at different times of the day. These executed measures led to significant kWh savings.

▲Construction and construction costs are not an exact science: Information derived from data may be predicable; people are not.

▲ The process takes time: Construction encompasses more that just the time it takes to physically build a store. It also involves the lease-negotiating phase, drawing phases, permit phase and bidding phase.

▲ Smaller spaces don’t always translate into big cost reductions: It’s often assumed that as store square footage gets smaller, the overall costs go down.

Philadelphia — Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust has completed the previously announced sale of South Mall in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for $23.6 million. Net of closing costs, settlement pro-rations and credits, proceeds from the transaction totaled approximately $23.1 million.

In addition, PREIT has entered into an Agreement of Sale to dispose of its two remaining non-core malls — Nittany Mall and North Hanover Mall.

Fernando Madeira will succeed Joel Anderson as president and CEO of Walmart.com to help the retailer further a growth strategy focused on winning at the integration of physical and digital. Anderson left to become president of fast-growing teen and pre-teen retailer Five Below.

West coast retailer Smart & Final could be heading East soon thanks to big plans for a warehouse club-like concept called Extra it believes has nationwide potential for more than 1,250 stores.

Scottsdale, Ariz. – Although 50% of CEOs say that their supply chain can be a strategic differentiator in the new omni-channel customer paradigm, 83% of worldwide CEOs believe that their retail supply chains are currently “not optimal” for today’s changing retail environment.